On Forgiveness
by ncfan
Summary: "What happened to your mother?" Missing scene from 'The Southern Raiders.'


I own nothing.

* * *

She had been sick, before they got back on Appa. She'd fallen to her knees and vomited up salty bile in a rain puddle. Katara had been thinking, thinking about the sort of man who could offer up his own mother's life in place of his own, and suddenly those thoughts intersected with what she remembered of her mother's body after he was done with it, and her stomach heaved. Zuko had looked away and said nothing, waiting for her to finish and get back to her feet. She couldn't tell whether he was trying to be polite or if he was just embarrassed. Katara wasn't sure why that mattered, really.

It was still raining, now that they were flying back to the island where they'd settled with the others. Zuko had been completely silent since he had climbed into Appa's saddle, asking her not a single question about why she had done what she had, let the man who killed her mother go instead of killing him herself. He seemed lost in his own thoughts. That was fine by Katara, clutching Appa's reins as though she might lose her grip on all things solid and real if she let go. She needed to sort out her thoughts as well.

"_You go find your dad; I'll take care of this."_

Kya had taken care of things, alright. The rain pounded on Katara's shoulders, feeling as though they'd peel her skin back and make her bleed, as she remembered the way that man had told her she'd taken care of it. _She died because of me. She lied and told him that she was the last waterbender. I'd be dead now if Mom hadn't…_

What kind of man did something like that? Killed so cruelly and so pointlessly, even when his victim had given herself up of her own will, had offered to become his captive, when she'd done nothing to provoke murder? Was there nothing in him at all? Was he just empty?

And then, he'd gone on, and lived a normal life. He'd just come in and casually destroyed Katara's life, and then walked out of her life just as casually, uncaring, and gone on to live his own 'normal' life. He'd retired with honors, likely received a pension, and Katara doubted that he ever thought much about the Water Tribe woman he'd murdered, or the daughter who had been his true target. That was probably the most galling part of all of it. Not even the fact that he was so much of a coward that he'd give up his own mother to save his wretched skin. Katara would lie awake for nights at a time, thinking about that day. How often had he ever thought of it?

Ultimately, she let the man who killed her mother go. She had come to find him, so intent on killing him, but when she saw him, cowering on the ground, wretched and empty, she faltered. She couldn't do it. No longer was this the man who was the nightmare of her every waking hour, the thing that had kept her up at night as a child. He was old, and pathetic. He looked at a young girl and cowered. Katara wasn't the sort of person who could kill someone who was on his knees before her, pleading and sobbing pitifully for his own life. She just wasn't. She wouldn't kill him, but she still couldn't forgive him.

Forgiveness…

Her gaze strayed backwards, and for a moment, Katara's stomach heaved again.

"_Oh, I don't know. Why don't you bring my mother back?"_

Katara winced. _That… That was cruel. I didn't need to say that._

He made her so angry, Zuko did. He hadn't just betrayed Aang in Ba Sing Se, and he hadn't just betrayed his uncle, either. He had betrayed _her_. She had trusted him, and he sank a knife in her back, and twisted it. He didn't even have the grace to seem a little sorry about it, either.

Then, he'd just turned right back around and said he wanted to help them, wanted to help Aang. Katara hadn't believed him, not really, at least she hadn't believed that he wouldn't eventually turn on them again—Zuko backstabbed so many people, so many times, that Katara suspected it was just part of his nature to backstab again and again and again. It made her angry, so she needled and jibed at him, taking pleasure in his dejection, and when he deliberately didn't rise to the bait as much as she expected him to, or at all, it just made her angrier. Everyone else came to trust Zuko, Aang and Toph and Sokka, but Katara couldn't. She didn't think she ever would. How could she trust someone who just seemed to have betrayal in his blood?

He made her so angry. But that anger wasn't there anymore. She looked at Zuko, and she felt tired.

Zuko still had a lot to answer for. Katara was the last person in the world who'd say that he didn't. He had a lot to answer for, but when she gave herself time to think, her mother's death wasn't on the list. It couldn't be. Zuko wasn't that much older than her. He was probably around the same age as Sokka, a year or so older at the most. He was just a little kid like her when Kya was killed. It wasn't Zuko's fault that Katara's mother was dead, and it wasn't fair to act like it was, but when she had looked at him, all she could see was how Kya looked, after her killer was done with her. But now, she couldn't see it anymore. She looked at Zuko, and all she could see was Zuko.

"Hey, Zuko…" Katara craned her head around, to make sure he could hear her over the pounding rain. "What happened to your mother?"

She had told herself, later, that he must have been lying when he said that his mother had been taken by the war too. Katara had been angry, after all. The look that came over his face when she asked him that, though, one part pain, one part anger, and one part undying frustration, made her realize that what he'd said about his mother must have been the truth. She knew those feelings. They couldn't be faked.

Barely seeming to notice the pounding rain, Zuko stared at her, one eye narrowed, and the other stuck in its permanent squint—Katara wondered briefly just how well he saw out of the eye on the scarred half of his face, before shelving the thought for another day. "Why do you want to know?" he asked in response, suspicion in his voice.

Katara set her mouth in a thin, grim frown. "Just call me curious. Plus, you've already heard all about my mother, so I figure…"

She didn't need to say any more; Zuko got the hint. He nodded, and his mouth, always set in a frown when at rest, seemed to frown even more deeply. "My mother disappeared when I was a boy," he said quietly. "Just vanished. No one would say anything about her, or where she'd gone. Azula seemed to know, but she always lies, you know, so even if she had told me, I don't think I would have believed her." He looked to the side and grimaced. Katara was faced with the unscarred side of his face, and suddenly it seemed graven, drawn. "I wondered about her, all the time. I didn't want to think that she was dead. When I was banished, and sent to hunt down the Avatar, I used to think that I might find her as well, that I might come up over the top of a hill or around a tree, and I'd see my mother there."

_How many times did I imagine that I'd see Mom around the next glacier or snow drift? _Katara wondered wearily to herself. _How many times did I try to convince myself that she wasn't really dead? After all, the… the body, it barely looked like her at all, so maybe it wasn't her._

But then, she'd remember that the necklace she was wearing right now had been on that body, miraculously unharmed, and all of Katara's dreams would shatter like a sheet of ice she'd made during practice, too thin and flimsy to withstand pressure.

"It's been six years, Katara," he told her heavily. _It's been six years since my mom died too_. "I held out hope for a long time, but by the time I came to Ba Sing Se with Uncle, I started to think that maybe she was dead after all. I stopped thinking that I would ever see her again." He paused, and his gaze was far away. "It seemed like too much to hope for.

"But then…" Katara started a little at the sound of a faint strain of hope in his voice. Hope wasn't something she was used to hearing in Zuko's voice. "Then, on the day of the eclipse, I found out that she wasn't dead, after all. At least, she hadn't disappeared _because _she'd been killed. She was banished, instead."

"Banished?" Katara blinked in surprise, wondering what on earth Zuko's mother could have done to be banished. She knew nothing about the woman, but for some reason, she kept imagining a person very similar to her own mother, and couldn't imagine Kya ever doing anything to get herself banished from the Southern Water Tribe. "Why was she banished?"

Zuko paused, and she rolled her eyes tiredly. Boys and their pride. "Oh, get over it. It's not like I'm going to go around spreading Fire Nation royal family secrets."

This hadn't been a light-hearted conversation to start with. Something in Zuko's expression told Katara that it wasn't going to get any more light-hearted. The rain plastered his hair to his cheeks, nearly obscuring his face from view, but she could still see his eyes, even through his long, shaggy bangs. They were sad, melancholy. She was used to Zuko looking grumpy, or brooding, or having a mean look in his eyes. She wasn't used to him looking sad. "My uncle," he started, in an uncommonly soft voice. "He had a son. His name was Lu Ten. He was nine years older than me, but he would play with me when I was a boy. My cousin treated me like a little brother.

"When my uncle went to conquer Ba Sing Se, Cousin Lu Ten went with him. After months of fighting, my uncle breached the outermost wall; victory seemed imminent. But then, something happened."

"Your cousin was killed," Katara supplied quietly, looking away. She remembered Iroh, remembered him as a kind man despite the fact that, for most of the time she knew him, he had fought against her. She didn't like to think of the sort of anguish he must have felt at the loss of his son, even if he had been seeking to overthrow the Earth Kingdom when Lu Ten was killed.

Zuko nodded grimly. "My cousin's body was broken on the great walls of Ba Sing Se. Lu Ten was Uncle's only child; my aunt had died long before I was born. He was devastated." His voice caught slightly. If Katara hadn't been listening intently, she might not have heard it over the rain. "He called off the siege, and didn't return home for a very long time. When he came back, he was a different man. Outwardly, he seemed much the same, but I could tell…" His good eye glazed over, and he shook his head.

"When news of Lu Ten's death and Uncle's abandonment of the siege reached the capital, my father went to my grandfather, Fire Lord Azulon. He…" Zuko's nostrils flared. His good eye glittered angrily. "…He claimed that my uncle's line had 'failed', and my uncle had failed the Fire Nation. My father requested that Fire Lord Azulon name him as his heir, displacing my uncle.

"My father told me the rest of the story, on the day of the eclipse. Fire Lord Azulon was furious, and demanded that my father kill me as punishment for attempting to usurp my uncle." Katara stared at him, wide-eyed, as the pieces began to fall into place. She barely remembered to check to make sure they were still going the right way. "My father told me that he was going to do it; Azula had heard him agree to it, and came to me to gloat. My mother heard us arguing, and dragged Azula off for a 'talk.' She must have found out the plan from her.

"She confronted my father. He says they devised a plan between them that would end with me still alive and my father as Fire Lord. He told me that my mother did 'vicious, treasonable things'…" His voice practically dripped sarcasm "…that night, and he banished her as punishment. The day after this happened, my mother was gone, Fire Lord Azulon was dead, and my father was crowned Fire Lord."

"So…" Katara was shocked by this story, and even more shocked by the implications of it. "Your mother killed the last Fire Lord to protect you?"

Zuko's face flushed dark red. "It was never proved that she killed _anyone_!" he snapped.

"Okay, cool it!" It seemed pretty obvious to Katara, just listening to Zuko's story, that his mother _had _killed the last Fire Lord, but if he wanted to keep an image of her as someone who wasn't a killer, that was his business. She turned back around and tried to concentrate on steering Appa back towards the island they had settled on, tried to ignore the freezing rain beating on her back, the rain she couldn't even be bothered to waterbend away from her.

Aang was right. It was hard to forgive someone. It wasn't just hard. It was draining. Katara felt exhausted just trying, just thinking about it. She couldn't forgive the man who had killed her mother. And Zuko still had a lot to answer for. Katara knew now that it wasn't fair to take her anger over her mother's death out on him. There were plenty of things that Zuko himself had done that she could be angry about, enough that she didn't need to add Kya's death to the list. _But… Do I really want to be angry at him?_

She wasn't quite sure yet.

"Zuko…" Katara couldn't hide the fatigue in her voice anymore. "I've just got one more question."

"Shoot."

"Why did you help me with this?"

She wasn't looking at him, so Katara could only guess at the look on his face. From what she knew of Zuko, she imagined him looking surprised and irritated at being asked a question whose answer should have been obvious, but it wasn't obvious, not to her. "I was doing this to gain your trust, remember?"

Katara shook her head. "That's not it. At least, that's not all of it. I can understand you _proposing _the idea to gain my trust, but the lengths you went to during our… mission go beyond that. You weren't just doing that to gain my trust. So why?" She found that there was no anger to go into the question, no suspicion, no accusation. It was just a question, born out of quiet curiosity.

"In your place, I would have liked to have been given the chance," Zuko said simply. "When I thought my mother was dead, and I didn't know who had made her vanish, I would have given anything to know who had made her disappear, and make them pay. That you didn't is your own business; I don't think the man who killed your mother's going to forget you any time soon. But now…" He sighed heavily. "…Now, I just want to find her." Any attempt to hide the longing in his voice failed miserably. Katara felt her own heart hurt.

"When this is over, if we're both still alive, I'll help you find your mother."

The words were out of her mouth before they were even formed properly in her head. She turned around to meet the gaze of an astonished Zuko, lost for words, and Katara forced a smile onto her face. "I think you deserve to know what happened to your mother too," Katara remarked too-brightly. "And after what you've told me, I kind of want to meet her myself."

Hesitantly, as though unsure of her sincerity, Zuko smiled back.

Later, when the rain had stopped and they made it back to camp, Katara rushed up to Zuko and hugged him. "I think I am ready to forgive you," was all she said.

Forgiveness was difficult, and tiring. Holding on to anger was harder, and more tiring. He didn't deserve it, and neither did she. What was worst, probably, was the way he went stiff and faltered before wrapping his arms around her back, as though he was still expecting an attack, after all that time. But after a horribly long moment, Zuko accepted her hug for what it was, and that gave Katara hope, that maybe what was undone in her could be undone in him too.


End file.
